Another Fun NHRA SuperNationals

Yesterday marked our third journey to Englishtown NJ and the 2009 SuperNationals. As always it was great fun. A few notes:

• Early rain delayed the start of the day's events, which allowed for more viewing of cars in pits, playing games, and such.
• The the DHL Top Fuel Funny Car did a solo pass in honor of Scott Kalitta who died at this event last year.
• In response to Scott's accident NHRA has shortened Top Fuel finish line to 1000 ft from 1,320 ft.
• Interesting that the article above notes that it will still allow fans to see cars at near 300 mph speeds.
• Ashley Force and a few of the TF-Dragsters still managed to go over 300MPH.
• Honestly, the sound, the flames, the speed, it doesn't matter if you go to 1,320 or not, it's great.
• They closed the track a little earlier this year so the night qualifying was not quite as late as last year.
• Still watched some flaming action when the top fuel cars lined up after 7pm local time.

Full slide show of mostly racing.

New camera made for some really nice action photos - able to snap off 30 frames. Here's a full set of a side-by-side Top Fuel Funny Car race from start, until the camera reached buffer max.

Futuristic Car Ads

I was browsing through the paper today and turned to the back cover. As usual it was filled with car ads. I found this regular looking ad.
Now I ask you - if you had managed the spectacular task of transporting the cars from the year 2099 back to our time, wouldn't you do a little more than just put a little ad in the newspaper?

Racing Dream Day

Well Sunday is the day. What a great day for a race fan. Monaco F1 Grand Prix @ 8am EDT. Indy 500 at 1pm and Coca-Cola 600 at 5:45pm. It will be nearly 10 hours of racing from sun up to sun down. Thankfully there are a few breaks in there. Watched qualifying again for the F1 race. Lewis planted it in the wall, so he's starting 16th - not a very good location for him. Button on pole, Kimi alongside, with Rubens in 3rd - the Brawn GP team is continuing the pace. Should be a good race.

weather.com is ad-noying to the max

Today I was reminded why I never use weather.com. First - it never simply accepts what I want. Example I type in: Detroit, MI. It comes back and gives me two choices: Detroit Michigan and Detroit Wayne County Airport. Now I ask you - if I type Detroit, MI don't you think I want Detroit, Michigan? Also - how different could weather possibly be between the airport and downtown. So I choose Detroit and am presented with a very nice banner at the top of the screen allowing me to search for more stuff, and an advertisement off to the right for water, or something. It tells me what the temperature is right now - which is actually useful data. I need to scroll down to find out what the next 36 hours may bring, I won't even go into the scrolling feature of web sites, far too much information is buried down below instant visibility for my taste, but that is an entire other rant. I count a total of 7 ads on this page alone, not counting the software push to have weather on my desktop. I am therefore an avid user of wunderground.com - although they too are slipping into ad nonsense.

Fun day in Shanghai

What started as a near wash out with the first dozen or so laps run behind the safety car turned into a decent race. Everyone stayed on full wets the entire race, but there was enough off/on action and Lewis provided adventure by, as the commentators noted, "needing to pass each person two or three times" to make it stick as he would frequently misjudge traction and do a pirouette and cycle back a few spots. Vettel came up aces on the pole, and rode it through to victory. The kid seems to have the right metal - now he just needs to keep it up. Driver standings look a bit like someone gave them the old switcheroo - Timo Glock in 4th!?!?!? Team standings are even more bizzaro - Ferrari tied with mighty Force India-Mercedes after three races. Red Bull found the juice in the wet. Next week will likely be very dry - but could be just as dry as the sands blow across the track in Bahrain.

FIA - Ferrari Intervention Association

Well not really - but they certainly seem to be very anti-McLaren. Then again, perhaps the boys in black and orange deserve it. Certainly wasn't very sporting to be telling misleading tales regarding passing and encouraging passing while behind the safety car.

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Well two races down and many more to go. We'll see how long it takes for the other teams to adopt the better diffuser and get the big boost of speed that Brawn GP has. Quite an interesting season so far - team standings shows STR-Ferrari has more points than the factory team, and Toyota pulling in more points than they have collected in the past five seasons combined (well not literally but it sure seems like it). Still amounts to whopping $5M-$7M per point for them, pretty hefty outlay for a company being pounded by the global recession.

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Next week China - BTW - The Official Formula One Site is quite a bit less attractive and useful than it was a few years ago. I don't like that I have to scroll down to see how long until the next race and am inundated with video and ads as the "main thing" I see when I connect.

More 2009 F1 Cars

• Renault and Williams - Williams isn't horrific, maybe because livery is black and you can't see it so well. Renault is closer to horrific than elegant
• Ferrari - horrific

F1 has gone - SICK!

Ok - so they switched to slick tires, great. Why is it we need to be pushing around a snow plow on the front of the car. What is it we're trying to develop!?!?!?

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F1 going slick

Cost reduction is everywhere. Honda was forced to drop out, and in continuing response to escalating costs F1 is responding. One of the changes that I think will be interesting will be the return to slick tyres. Although I must say - I do like seeing the grooves on the tyres, curious to see how they let us know hard vs. soft for the "topic of discussion" to remain just that.

There are a lot of other proposals coming as well, same engines, same transmissions, etc. to go along with the same tyres, they now all run. I fear that we may be headed for an IROC series - how uncool would that be.

Well this season was good - let's hope the future ones will be as well.

Steelers Football - I am a fan

Well I must now confess, I think that I have become a Steelers fan. I have always eschewed allegiance to the team even though I lived there for 25 years. My wife Rhoda is an avid fan, and gets rather upset when they do poorly and excited when they do well. Watching the game today - Big Ben Rothlisberger started out early with a delay of game penalty. Throughout the game so far - he has come close a few more times - which is very frustrating. He also is frequently being pressured in the pocket and rushing his passes, the line just isn't protecting him well. Also - for reasons I can't explain the Steelers have had bad special teams coverage, especially on kick-offs and punts for what seems like the last 10 years.

Given my ability to rattle off all of this information, as well as the very real frustration I felt when Ben took the penalty, I can no longer stand upon the "I am not a fan" rock.

Computing has become needlessly complex

Over the past year I have been thinking a lot about how needlessly complex computing has become. In addition to being so complex it is often causing people a lot of aggravation and anxiety in trying to manage it, and accomplish what they want. I've started a new blog to try to capture observations about things that have progressed, but perhaps have not gotten better.